Sometimes you’ll hear people say that Search is a solved problem.  It turns out that’s not really true.  What we’ve solved is a specific subset of Search where the person doing the searching already knows what it is they’re looking for.

You can go to Google and search for “James Brown” or you can go to Amazon and search for “metal grabber utensil” and the search results are going to be the very things you seek.  It doesn’t matter how vague metal grabber utensil is, the second search result is for cooking tongs.  That search is solved.

There’s a whole other class of search problems, though, and computers are terrible at them.  Continue reading →